HUDSON, N.Y. - It wasn't a civil war, not this time. But it was almost the end of the National.

It wouldn't have been a bad run. After all, the band wasn't the most likely pick from the early-aughts New York rock explosion to become one of that genre's most enduring groups. It's a family affair, made up of Cincinnati natives who make textured emotional rock music for adults. Twin brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner helm multiple instruments (mainly guitar and piano), with Bryce providing orchestration; brothers Scott and Bryan Devendorf man the rhythm section, while frontman Matt Berninger often writes lyrics and vocal melodies with his wife, Carin Besser.

They don't put out chart-topping singles. They still hold precious the idea of a fully realized album, even in this Spotify era. They practically invented the genre referred to as "sad dad rock," but, oh well. "We did it to ourselves," Bryan Devendorf says. (The description feels particularly apt when several members of the band excitedly discuss how to enlarge the fonts on their screens for easier reading while lounging around before a rehearsal in late February. They're young enough to still pump out anthemic rock songs but old enough to begin worrying about their kids' screen time.)

Their story arc doesn't fit the recipe for success in our pop-centric era, but, unlikely as it seems, it's led them to play amphitheaters around the world, become the soundtrack of both Obama campaigns and earn fans such as Taylor Swift. "Luckily the National's never been in fashion, so it can't be out of fashion," Bryce Dessner says.

Their music feels "like listening to someone's journal when I wasn't supposed to be," superfan Antoni Porowski of Netflix's "Queer Eye" says. "There's something so romantic and beautiful about it."

Part of the band's lore is that each of its eight albums have almost broken it, that the infighting gets so bad during the creative process, they named their 2007 breakout "Boxer." Hard truth or rock-and-roll myth? "We do, a little bit, yeah," Berninger says. "But I would describe our band as pretty caring, a pretty healthy, kind, caring family."

Either way, there was no real fighting while making their ninth - "First Two Pages of Frankenstein," out April 28. "The process of making this music was by far the least fractured and contentious in years. We weren't fighting one another anymore," Bryce says. "We'd been jostling - at times, properly throwing punches - for years."

Instead, they found the simple joy in making something together again, because for a few years, it seemed like another album simply might not happen. The members had drifted apart, literally, with Berninger in Los Angeles, Bryan in Ohio, Bryce in France, Aaron Dessner in Upstate New York and Scott Devendorf in Long Island. The pandemic put a near-perpetual, 20-year touring schedule on ice. Everyone had other projects, and Berninger was completely blocked, falling into a depression.

In some ways, the timing couldn't be worse as the band surely gained more than a few new followers after Aaron co-wrote and co-produced "Folklore" and "Evermore," Swift's two pandemic records. The band appeared on the latter record, opening their work to whole new swaths of potential fans.

Nonetheless, they all had the same thought: Maybe the National is over.

It wasn't, but it felt close. Making the album was less a civil war, more a reconstruction. As Scott says, it's about "rebirth."

"This record kind of saved our band. I mean, every single one of our records saved our band in one way or another," Berninger says. "But this one, the record really came to the rescue."

Hudson is a curious town arranged around one long strip of bespoke bars, restaurants and craft shops. One drunk bar patron refers to it as "upstate Brooklyn." Which sounds like the subject of a National song. It's the kind of place where finding dinner after 9 p.m. on a Sunday is a scavenger hunt, where you recognize half the residents after a day of ambling around, where you might spot a Devendorf brother buying Topo Chico at a CVS at 9 a.m.

If the band is a family, Long Pond Studio, roughly 10 miles north of Hudson, is its home. With architect Erlend Neumann, Aaron built it in 2015, a hundred yards from his house. The structure is reminiscent of the band's music: simple at first glance, ever more complex on closer examination. Its first floor is split into a kitchen and a studio with large windows that can open to the Hudson Valley, inviting the chirps of warblers nesting in the trees outside into the waiting microphones. Bedrooms are upstairs.

There is no tension today. They hang around in the studio's kitchen space, snacking on bananas, kale salad, absurdly strong coffee and homemade soup. They chat breezily about their kids' relationship to video games (Minecraft is a popular one), who has and hasn't gotten the coronavirus (somehow, Berninger has so far eluded it), their appearance on Jimmy Fallon, upgrades to various Cincinnati-area high school gyms, the Afghan Whigs and the winter storm bearing down on the Hudson Valley later that evening. At some point Scott explains the concept of polarized sunglasses to Berninger.

And they chat about Long Pond.

Here they recorded 2017's "Sleep Well Beast," their seventh album, which earned them their first Grammy. The album cover is a snapshot of the studio. Two years later, they teamed up with filmmaker Mike Mills to collaborate on music for a short film that led to the album "I Am Easy to Find."

The studio promised respite. But in a band known for its brutally endless touring schedule that was also trying to balance lives with spouses and children, everyone was exhausted. ("There are 365 days in a year. The National tours for 600 of them," musician Bartees Strange jokes.)

"It felt like we started touring in 2001, we hadn't really had a break," Aaron says. After "I Am Easy to Find," "we were sort of running on fumes."

"It was the end of a chapter, the trajectory we'd been on since 'Alligator,'" which came out in 2005, Bryce says. "We had stretched the identity of what the National was to its breaking point."

A break seemed natural. As the pandemic swept the world, the band stopped touring. "Then what we thought was going to be a short break turned into a very long break," Aaron says. "And for the first time in 20 years as a band, we sort of went quiet."

Projects pulled them in different directions. On one serendipitous day several weeks into the shutdown, Aaron received a text message from Swift asking if he would like to collaborate. He began producing other pop stars, such as Ed Sheeran. Bryce, meanwhile, continued to score films, such as Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Bardo." Non-National projects abounded.

If there was ever a time to call it quits, this was it.

But one day about a year later, Aaron was writing music, as he did throughout the pandemic, and thought: This might be a National song.

"At some point, we started to miss that engine of the band," he says. "You start to crave it."

If the pandemic was prolific for Aaron, it was the opposite for Berninger. Before 2020, he was working on a number of projects, including solo work, in what he calls a "manic creative state." But as the world shut down, he "hit a wall" on everything he was working on. "I fell off the bike or something. I'd always been working on songs for so long, and the gears just froze."

He had experienced some version of writer's block before, for a month or two, but this felt different. A year passed. The pandemic worsened. He made no progress on any song for any project.

"I never thought, 'It might actually be gone' before. I'd never gone into something that paralyzing," Berninger says, comparing the feeling to losing a sense, not being able to communicate at his most primal level. His bandmates suggested writing about not being able to write, but "it's hard to write about the darkness when the lights are off."

Meanwhile the band had compiled upward of 25 musically polished songs in need of lyrics. They asked Berninger to come out to Long Pond and sit with the songs, see what happens.

He often mumbled in a low register, reaching for something that wasn't there ... yet.

But words were slowly forming.

And over time ...

The pandemic restrictions began lifting, and the band prepared a short tour in 2022. Paralysis was no longer an option, which isn't to say those first few shows were easy - especially for an exuberant frontman prone to unabashedly emoting onstage, hoisting a mic stand over his head, slapping his thighs, wading into the audience to wail lyrics like, "I'm Mr. November, I won't f--- us over!" "I had a really tough time just getting back on that stage and turning on that performer," Berninger says. At the first show back, "I could barely look at the crowd. I didn't want to be in front of people." It helped to realize that many of the faces he was seeing had been there all along, coming to National shows for 15 years or more. With that, the band came back to life.

Berninger relates this as he sits in an enormous RV parked in front of Aaron's house, which is here because the house is under renovation. He tugs and musses his short-cropped gray hair, lounging on pleather seats in front of the RV's faux fireplace, pausing to laugh when I keep accidentally turning on the massage function on the recliner I'm sitting in. ("Suddenly, you're a whole lot more relaxed," Berninger jokes the first time.)

"First Two Pages of Frankenstein" faces head-on the fears, within the band and among its fans, that the National was done. Berninger says he doesn't always write with specific characters or stories in mind, rather in image fragments that come to mind while listening to the music and that are often focused on "relationships falling apart." But a lot of it ends up being about the band, the "central cog of our adult lives." So, naturally, the album includes a number of songs about "things that are gone, or things you're worried are leaving, so many songs about being disconnected from things," Berninger says.

"This is the closest we've ever been, and I have no idea what's happening. Is this how this whole thing is gonna end?" he sings on the album opener, "Once Upon a Poolside." The second track, "Eucalyptus," is basically a list of "the funny things" a couple, or maybe members of a group, are dividing before going their own ways, down to the Mountain Valley Spring Water. "I was suffering more than I let on," he moans on "Tropic Morning News."

But as the 11 songs pass, the skies brighten. On the closer he croons: "Send for me whenever, wherever. Send for me. I'll come and get you."

The band often insists its familiar nature is what keeps it together. Over the years, it's built up an extended family, as well, often inviting artists such as Sufjan Stevens, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Sharon Van Etten and others to come hang around the studio while they record, sometimes adding ideas and flourishes to written songs. "We've got the windows and the doors open," Bryce says. "Sometimes it's like a cul-de-sac. You end up on a dead-end circle where you've pushed a song as far as you can go, and then it's really nice to go the extra step with a collaborator."

Stevens returns on the new record (on "Once Upon a Poolside"), which also includes newcomers Phoebe Bridgers and Swift, who sings a duet with Berninger.

Close as they've become, Aaron admits to having been anxious asking the pop star to contribute. "I didn't want to put that pressure on her, just knowing how often she gets asked to do things. ... Then Matt wrote this song, 'The Alcott,' the main part, and you could just hear there's a lot of space in it, and I thought Taylor might hear something."

So he sent it to her. About a half-hour passed, and Aaron began worrying he "put her in the awkward position of having to say, 'Sorry.'"

"By the time she responded, she had already written the song," he says. "She's that gifted. She just sang it into her phone and sent it back."

That sense of communal generosity extends to its fan base, as well. When Porowski would wear the band's T-shirts on "Queer Eye," fans from around the world flooded his inbox with messages like, "'You're a fan of the National? I automatically love you because you understand what it's like to have a bleeding heart,'" he says. "When you meet another National fan, you are immediately bonded."

Perhaps no one embodies that phenomenon better than Bartees Strange. Before recording his breakout album "Live Forever" during the pandemic, he made an EP of National covers. It caught the attention of the band's fans and soon the band, which now regularly invites Strange not just to open but to occasionally join them onstage. It's still surreal for Strange, who not only counts the National as his favorite band but as one of his biggest inspirations.

"They have proven over their career that quality really matters. That great songs can win," Strange says. "Not only did it happen for them, but it happened on their own terms. They never strayed from the thing they did, and the world opened up to them."

"And now," he adds, "they have one of the most loyal fan bases ever. Everyone loves them like family. National fans are like Grateful Dead fans. It's a whole community. I just have so much respect for what they built."

Perhaps that hints at the secret, what's kept them together - the community they built around themselves of fans who are tremendously loyal, and the way that the members of the National count themselves as some of their own biggest fans. That's less about ego and more about passion: They're making the music they want to hear.

"The music this band makes together I think is all of our favorite music still," Berninger says. "The National is my favorite band."